Sociology

This article develops a sociological understanding of consumer resilience across three national contexts during a prolonged, global health crisis – COVID-19. We asked 112 individuals from the UK, China and Malaysia to diarise their consumption during the initial lockdowns of 2020. We found that when social subjects were confronted with material, socio-relational and symbolic restrictions, two types of anxieties emerged – health, safety and wellbeing and social alienation – along with three coping-response strategies, consumer purification, consumer policing and consumer sociality. At this anxiety–coping interface, we identify reflexive, emotive and transformative narratives that are productive of consumer resilience. In this era of ‘Permacrisis’ relating to war, health, climate and cost-of-living, it is essential to examine consumer behaviour under conditions of deep uncertainty to comprehend how (resilient) social subjects use the (non-)market domain to cope with anxieties caused by multifaceted restrictions placed on everyday life.

Extensive research has been conducted on the reproduction of gender inequalities in professional hiring, despite the claim of meritocracy and commitment to equality in professional sectors. While the existing literature highlights the significance of understanding gender inequalities in the context of globalisation of professional firms and their practices, it has predominantly focused on the Anglo-Saxon context. There remains a gap in the literature regarding how gender inequalities are produced in professional hiring in the context of China. Drawing on qualitative material, this study explores the gendered processes of graduate hiring in elite professional firms in China. By applying the perspective of gender practices, this article elucidates how Chinese recruiters construct male favouritism and rig the selection process. The analysis sheds light on the processes that produce gender inequalities and hinder the progress of women in the context of growing competition and lack of support for women’s participation in professional work.

Recent, UK-based studies have focused on the construction of working-class masculine identity and documented changes and softer displays among young men. This article contributes to this literature and is based on ethnographic research conducted in Wales, UK, and a sample consisting of the most marginalised working-class young men often associated with protest masculinity, homophobia and misogyny. The findings illustrate that although the participants disclose behaviours linked to protest masculinity, they also demonstrate softer masculine displays, including physical tactility, sensitivity, gender-egalitarian views and rejection of homophobia. Although the elements of protest masculinity discount the embodiment of pure inclusive masculinity, the changes in views and behaviours among the subgroup of working-class young men are significant and congruent with other research in this field. The combination of gender practices is conceptualised as ‘amalgamated masculinities’, a fusion of locally constructed protest masculine characteristics and softer masculine attributes adopted through external cultural influence.

Life-course theories on how social relationships affect mental health are limited in causal claims. The restrictions in social contact during the coronavirus pandemic provided a natural experiment that modified the frequency of in-person contact and allowed us to estimate the effect of changes in in-person social contact frequency on mental health in four large nationally representative age-cohorts of adults living in the UK. There was consistent evidence of a small but statistically significant effect of less frequent social contact on anxiety-depression. Online modes of social contact did not compensate for the restrictions in in-person social contact during the pandemic. Young adults who increased their online social media frequency during the pandemic experienced a deterioration in mental health. Life-course theories cannot ignore the importance of the mode of social contact for social relationships, especially during young adulthood.

A growing number of workers today are drawn to jobs that offer symbolic and cultural rewards but not necessarily stable employment or livable wages. Existing literature posits the exploitative nature of this labor arrangement, where workers must weigh the ‘cool’ aspects of their jobs against other less desirable aspects. Yet what happens when both these dimensions of work are deeply intertwined and subject to changing perspectives? Drawing on ethnographic data and in-depth interviews with US craft beer workers, we show how ‘cool’ aspects of brewery jobs are experienced as significant sources of material, social, and work identity strain that cause some workers to grow estranged from their jobs over time. We suggest a broader framework for understanding the hidden strains of jobs that appeal to workers for symbolic reasons, and advocate for shifting jobs in the new economy away from cool-yet-precarious employment bargains and toward more sustainable forms of employment.

Increasingly hostile immigration policies in the UK produce insecure immigration statuses and exclusion from public services and mainstream welfare benefits. Little is known about how this precaritization affects racially minoritized mothers with insecure immigration statuses and ‘no recourse to public funds’. The ethnographic study on which this article is based explored the impact of hostile policies on mothering, and found that precaritization increases the significance of mothers’ informal support networks, including friendships. I show how hostile policies constrain mothers’ friendship practices, shaping access to support. I argue that while mothers share diverse forms of support through their everyday friendship practices, they have to navigate dialectical tensions (contradictions) that play out in ways specific to their precarious legal and financial positioning. Applying theories of friendship and relational dialectics, I highlight the importance of safe, sociable spaces and sustained ‘friendship work’ to navigate tensions and nurture friendships as sites of support.

Human rights often fall short of challenging oppression because they are enmeshed with conservative institutions, such as the law and the state. Despite these shortcomings, grassroots organisations contesting border regimes in Berlin often make use of human rights in their everyday mobilisation. They engage in autonomous forms of mobilisation outside the state and construct non-legal notions of human rights that are emancipatory for racialised migrants. However, these same organisations also address demands to state authorities by using legal notions of human rights. In this article, I draw on the framework focusing on abolition and non-reformist reforms, which have been developed by activists and scholars in their resistance to policing and the Prison-Industrial Complex. I innovatively extend its use to propose a nuanced understanding of grassroots approaches to human rights. Specifically, I argue that these approaches entail the concurrent pursuit of short-term reformist reforms and border abolition.

In this article, we draw attention to the border and border governance as key mechanisms of class and ‘race-making’ in the context of an increasingly hostile immigration environment. Focusing on the life story narratives of migrants experiencing homelessness, we extend the reach of analysis beyond the experiences of asylum seekers to gain a stronger understanding of migrant experiences more broadly. In our analysis, we reveal the temporal continuum of suffering endured, ranging from the ‘slow violence’ of the everyday, rooted in precarity and restricted access to the labour market and support services, to moments of rupture where there is a swift decline in circumstances, leading to homelessness. When, at last, the tempo of suffering slows again, these individuals are increasingly excluded from meaningful calendars of activity as they spend their time waiting, often in vain, for an outcome of a Home Office application or for the possibility of some longer-term accommodation.

Public houses have long served an important social role in the United Kingdom, yet in recent decades the conditions under which they operate have changed dramatically. While research has examined adaptations in the pub sector, there is little analysis of how this relates to social change as experienced in the lives of individuals and communities. Pubs are therefore a useful topic of sociological inquiry. Using focus groups data, this article examines how people experience the changing form and function of pubs reveals insights into perceptions of social change. Findings show that participants were aware of how pub culture has changed over recent decades and that this was linked to perceptions of wider social and cultural changes in society. Talking about pub going was a means to express dynamic feelings of belonging and attachment, particularly where they arise at the intersection of personal life changes and wider social transformations.

The article explores the biographical process of becoming a nationalist activist in the environment of Polish football supporters. Analysing the issue in focus, it also aims to show how the biographical approach can be a useful method to study the processes of reproduction of bottom–up nationalism in general. To this end, we use the classic theoretical approach of Thomas and Znaniecki to explore autobiographical narratives from interviews with 35 nationalist activists from supporter groups of Polish football clubs. The analysis identifies three patterns of the process of becoming a nationalist activist, which are described as patterns typical of keepers, the awakened and followers. The study indicates that the national-martyrological attitude is the foundation of the distinguished paths, and shows how the supporter environment develops the national-martyrological attitude into nationalist activism.

This article examines the perspectives of student teachers from working class backgrounds about not becoming middle class. Little attention has been paid to conceptualisations of social class in teaching. In the context of drives internationally to diversify teaching populations, research is needed about the experiences of student teachers from working class backgrounds in their upwardly mobile trajectories. This article draws on a constructivist grounded theory study about the social class identities of 21 student teachers from working class backgrounds as part of a wider teacher diversity project in Ireland. Distinguishing between class ‘mentality’ and materiality, participants emphasised that one could not change class completely, rejected the middle classness of a teacher’s social status and positioned working class ‘mentality’ as morally superior. Those from working class backgrounds do not simply relinquish aspects of their identity through upward social mobility, suggesting that habitus may not always be divided upon traversing class boundaries.

This article focuses on how the imaginary of a ‘safe’ environment was visualised and conveyed within the hospitality sector during the COVID-19 pandemic, drawing on diaries and interviews with 21 workers in the UK. Our findings show increased workloads for hospitality staff, compounded by anxieties of risk and individualised COVID-19 regulation work. This includes workers’ negotiations of corporeal boundaries and distancing from customers, the visible cleaning of communal areas and recuperation and care work for their own bodies and others in shared living spaces. We draw on conceptualisations of embodied and emotional labour to understand these experiences, reflecting on the importance of the actions performed by workers in maintaining community spaces and creating customer confidence in safely enjoying a ‘hospitable’ environment. This article contributes to social science scholarship of embodied and emotional labour, hospitality and social reproduction.

Building on Della Porta’s work on social movement events, critical junctures, and legacies, this article studies the discursive practices, emotions and networks of the instant 48-hour mobilizations of the anti-European Super League (ESL) movement in English football in April 2021. In doing so, we show how this case reveals a new generation of conflict between the different supporter demographic and corporate constituencies that characterize elite football in England, and their politicized temporal structures. Showing how social movement ‘legacy’ operates as a multifaceted concept of power and time, we argue that the ‘puzzling out’ of a new post-ESL regulatory regime in football reveals the tensions between what are considered legitimate, and illegitimate, practices, which characterize the moral economy of the contemporary English football crowd.

A voluminous sociological literature sheds light on the multiple consequences of upward mobility on individuals’ psychological, emotional and relational lives. Much less studied, however, are the relationships, particularly romantic ones, potentially easing the class dislocation often tied to upward mobility. In this article, I draw upon 60 life-history interviews to examine how long-range upwardly mobile individuals relate and develop romantic ties in contemporary Chile. My findings reveal how romantic partners act as key bonds helping to mitigate the dislocating effects accompanying upward mobility, offering a ‘refuge’ and providing multifaceted support to the upwardly mobile, both in their adjustment to their class destination and when negotiating demands and ties with their class origins. These findings call for a new research agenda in the study of class, social mobility and intimacy.